Earthrise

by Craig Delancey

  Stars reeled quickly past outside, as the asteroid spun. Margherita clipped her suit to the ladder with a safety cable, and then leaned as far as she dared outside the hatch. She looked toward the axis, where a light shone.

  She stared a long time, her eyes wide, her mouth open in shock and wonder.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “That’s impossible.”

  “Excuse me,” the ship asked.

  Before her, glowing green in space, was the Second Green Disk, the smooth ring of verdant asteroids around the small star nearly two hundred light years from Earth.

  She had not moved. She had not moved at all.

  “It’s impossible,” she said. “It just can’t be.”

  CHAPTER 13

  As Bria and Tarkos walked down the Paris sidewalk, Tarkos repeatedly leapt ahead and then slowed to let Bria catch up, unable to control his pace.

  “Act like herbivore,” Bria growled.

  “Sorry,” Tarkos said. He realized he did look like some kind of skittish ungulate. “It’s… I’m just surprised—pleasantly surprised—that you agreed to meet my mother, and now I fear that something will, I don’t know, go wrong.”

  “Worry,” Bria said sympathetically. “Mother is honor judge.”

  Tarkos smiled. “Yes. Well put. And I want you to like her. I want her to like you.”

  “We are mothers,” Bria said, as if that settled it.

  French people stopped and stared, but no one spoke to them as they walked. Tarkos loved Paris—the white buildings lining busy streets, the people active and dignified, the mad traffic. He had reflected on this when they first stepped out onto the street. Here, as in New York, most people seemed already integrated into the Galactic Order. It was outside the cities, he had been told, that the unrest and fear and resistance swelled. Some people—the displaced from Bangladesh or Florida, were more likely to welcome membership in the Alliance. But many others feared they would be lost in a Galaxy of billions of aliens.

  Tarkos stopped abruptly. Bria would have kept loping forward, expecting him to follow, but he called out to her. “Bria! Please.”

  Across the street from where they walked, a building had recently been demolished, leaving only a rectangle of exposed soil. The walls of the two buildings that flanked the space were of unweathered brick, here and there sprouting twists of cut wire or gaping pipes. And in the center of the space, behind a chain link fence, a silver spire slowly grew, as small Kirt-designed robots climbed over its surface, affixing shining tiles to a skeleton of black metal.

  “What is it?” he said. “DiAngelo told the truth: they’re going up everywhere. It looks like a probability flange. Like the kind on our faster than light ships.”

  Bria looked at him, at the structure, and then blinked all four eyes in a row, a Sussurat nod.

  “Why a probability field generator?”

  “Can also act as detector,” she hissed.

  “Of what?”

  “Of dangers. Dangers of the Omega Threshold.”

  “Bria,” he said. “There is something weird here. That Hurlkor, that we captured last year, it spoke to me of the ‘threshold’ coming to Earth. And that terrorist on the elevator said that ‘the Omega Threshold is coming,’ and ‘they’ve nearly finished the control towers.’”

  Bria showed her teeth, a thoughtful expression. Then she said, very slowly, “Omega Threshold is described in contract of every new member of Galactic Civilization.”

  Tarkos frowned. Something was up. Bria never spoke in such long phrases, and never so evasively. But then a little girl ran up to them, touched Bria, shrieked a little laugh, and then ran away. Tarkos tensed but Bria only glanced at the child. She reminded Tarkos suddenly of lions he had seen on the savannah, suffering the bites of cubs.

  “Look,” Tarkos said. “I’ve read the treaty. Every civilization faces the Omega Threshold. That’s when their technology becomes so advanced that anyone, a single citizen, can kill millions. Can perhaps even kill the whole species. When a civilization approaches this threshold, quarantine of the world is broken. Galactic Civilization intervenes to offer to stabilize things. All this is common knowledge. But it seems almost like… the threshold means something different to some people. Are you saying these devices will help? They’ll allow us to detect threats?”

  Bria blinked again.

  “So why are they secret?” Tarkos asked.

  Bria waved a claw at the open street, where the pylon was being erected in open view. “Not secret. Just not discussed. First, citizenship.”

  Tarkos frowned. When Earth joined the Galactic Alliance—if Earth joined the Galactic Alliance, he reminded himself; the vote was still days away—then all Earth citizens would automatically become Second Citizens. They would be eligible for all the rights of Second Citizenship, which included things like free food, free education, and free health care. Those like Tarkos, who served the Alliance and travelled the Galaxy, earned First Citizenship. They could claim stake in the ecoforming of new worlds.

  “What does citizenship have to do with it?” Tarkos said.

  “The rich rule your world. This is true of many worlds. But more true of yours. Yours is worst.”

  “No it’s not.”

  Bria closed her top eyes.

  “Come on, it’s not,” Tarkos said, willing to disagree even if Bria’s gesture meant that he was being immature.

  “On Sussurat, a mother had sixteen times sixteen times wealth of other mothers. She is legend we tell our daughters, to teach them in shame. We hid our black eyes from her. Still, some had such wealth, during a dangerous time. We barely survived. And here: worse. On Earth: many have sixteen times sixteen times sixteen times sixteen times sixteen the wealth of nearly all others.”

  Tarkos frowned. “Alright. Suppose it is a plutocracy. So what?”

  “Galactic Citizenship will end poverty. After Alliance, wealthy will no longer run first in pack. No longer run far ahead of pack. Seeing this, will fight.”

  “Men like DiAngelo,” Tarkos said.

  Bria blinked in agreement. “Such are greatest threat now. Will call Alliance end of world. True: end of their world. Humans must prepare quickly, while the vote comes.”

  Tarkos whistled. He had struggled to be a Predator of the Galactic Alliance. The training and tests had been insanely hard. Like getting his Ph.D. at CalTech, only as if he were joining military special forces at the same time. He’d felt always underwater, always inadequate, always behind. He’d never known he could work so long, and it didn’t seem he worked enough. But there was another side to that. He had never seen organizations that were so… competent.

  “I’m glad the Alliance has done this before,” he said.

  “Many times,” Bria hissed.

  _____

  They came to a pair of white streets that forked to their right. This part of Paris was old: the buildings were two stories tall, and leaned out over the narrow cobble street.

  Tarkos turned in place. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t quite tell which way to go. The map I have says turn right, but they’re both right. Our implants might be secure and undetectable and all that, but I wish they could interface with standard systems better, so I could use the net.”

  Bria waved a claw. “Are sacred warriors for life. Do not care for unreality.”

  “I wish you were around when the others kids at school teased me for not having the best VR. Come on. It’s this branch, I think.”

  He walked down the closer street, Bria following. Fewer people walked this narrow avenue, although they all stared at Bria as she lumbered past.

  A black van started up the street, taking up nearly the whole road. Tarkos slipped back to the sidewalk, hoping to encourage Bria to make room for the vehicle.

  “This restaurant is one of the oldest in Paris, and so on Earth. My mother loves the history,” Tarkos said. “It has—”

  His voice froze. For a moment he stood, confused, believing that he had ceased to understand somethin
g. His mouth could not move. He could not turn his head. Something—someone—moved in the periphery of his vision. Dressed in black, hands together and held up. Emerging from a doorway.

  Then the pain hit him: every muscle in his body seized. He could just see the van approach on his right, and Bria to his left. She rose up on her back legs and roared. The roar echoed in the narrow street, making a sound that no being in the universe had heard more than once, other than Amir Tarkos.

  The pedestrians on the sidewalk all crouched and backed away, shouting in alarm. Tarkos could not move his eyes but enough of Bria hove into his field of vision that he could make out two black bolts, like small arrows, thrust into her shoulder. She charged forward. A third, fourth, and fifth of the arrows hit her.

  Tarkos tasted something. Blood. He was grinding his teeth, chewing his tongue or his cheek. Or perhaps he’d broken a tooth. The pain washed over him, a cramp in every muscle in his body.

  Bria tumbled. She rolled until she slammed into the van, now stopped in the street. Men and women dressed in black, with black hoods over their heads, poured out of the van. One of them rushed at Tarkos. Male, by the shape of him. Broad shouldered, with pale blue eyes. He reached forward and pulled Tarkos’s gun, and threw it in the street. It skittered loudly as it slid under the van. Then the man pulled an syringe.

  The fierce current from the arrows in his chest ceased. For a second Tarkos had control of his limbs again. But in that second the man in black pressed the syringe to Tarkos’s chest.

  His sore muscles seemed to disappear, one by one. Tarkos tilted to the side, and slowly tumbled onto the cobblestones. The pedestrians still screamed, all around. Eight men were trying to lift Bria into the van. Face against the cold cobbles of the street, Tarkos could see his gun where it lay on the ground under the van.

  Tarkos used his implants to interface with the weapon.

  “Follow,” he told it.

  The gun’s stock unfolded thin spider legs. It stood and leapt upwards, into the dark recesses around the van’s axle.

  Tarkos watched it disappear. Then his eyes fell closed. The last thing he heard was Bria give a last, dying roar.

  THE END

  The story of Omega Threshold completes with

  Omega Threshold: Earthfall.

  THE PREDATOR SPACE CHRONICLES

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  If you have not yet read or heard the story of the meeting of Tarkos and Bria, visit EscapePod and listen for free to “Asteroid Monte” at:

  http://escapepod.org/2012/02/23/ep333-asteroid-monte/

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Craig DeLancey is a writer and philosopher. He has published dozens of short stories in magazines like Lightspeed, Analog, Cosmos, Shimmer, and Nature Physics. His novel Gods of Earth is available now with 47North Press. Born in Pittsburgh, PA, he now makes his home in upstate New York and, in addition to writing, teaches philosophy at Oswego State, part of the State University of New York (SUNY).

  This is a work of fiction, and names, characters, and events herein are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual business establishments, places, events, or persons living or dead is coincidental. The author does take all credit, however, for descriptions of future conditions that later prove to come true.

  OMEGA THRESHOLD:

  EARTHRISE

  Predator Space Chronicles, Number 4

  Copyright 2018, Craig DeLancey

  496 Perfect Number Press

  Fourth edition

  This eBook was handcrafted by Book Coders.

  Cover by Ivan Zanchetta.